Salmon - Anita

• Salmon is a common name for several types of fish in the Salmonidae family. Other fish in the Salmonidae are Trout, Char, Grayling and Whitefish. Salmon are native to the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean.
• Typically, salmon are anadromous: they are born in fresh water, migrate to the ocean, then return to fresh water toreproduce. However, Many species of Salmon are restricted to live only in Fresh water for their whole lives.
• There are four different types of Salmon : Danube Salmon, Australian Salmon, Hawaiian Salmon and Indian Salmon.
• The salmon has long been at the heart of the culture and livelihood of coastal dwellers. Many people of the northern Pacific shore had a ceremony to honor the first return of the year. For many centuries, people caught salmon as they swam upriver to spawn. A famous spearfishing site on the Columbia River at Celilo Falls was inundated after great dams were built on the river. The Ainu, of northern Japan, trained dogs to catch salmon as they returned to their breeding grounds en masse. Now, salmon are caught in bays and near shore.
• In his 1908 State of Union, Theodore Roosevelt observed that the fisheries were in great decline.

The salmon fisheries of the Columbia River are now but a fraction of what they were twenty-five years ago, and what they would be now if the United States Government had taken complete charge of them by intervening between Oregon and Washington. During these twenty-five years the fishermen of each State have naturally tried to take all they could get, and the two legislatures have never been able to agree on joint action of any kind adequate in degree for the protection of the fisheries. At the moment the fishing on the Oregon side is practically closed, while there is no limit on the Washington side of any kind, and no one can tell what the courts will decide as to the very statutes under which this action and non-action result. Meanwhile very few salmon reach the spawning grounds, and probably four years hence the fisheries will amount to nothing; and this comes from a struggle between the associated, or gill-net, fishermen on the one hand, and the owners of the fishing wheels up the river.